The current state of the art for fiber impairment isolation requires dedicated equipment, commonly referred to as Optical Time Domain Reflectometers (“OTDRs”) to send short laser pulses into an optical fiber, with the goal of detecting reflections from discontinuities such as connectors, splice points, kinks, sharp bends, fiber faults, etc. Current OTDRs are costly precision instruments and allow detection of fiber discontinuities to within a few meters or less.
This dedicated equipment is expensive to deploy, however, and therefore is difficult to use in a preventative capacity. Hence, there is a need for impairment detection solutions that can be deployed at lower cost throughout a network.